Here's the good news.According to a recent article in The Hill, the Constitution has become a runaway best-seller.The Government Printing Office has sold nearly 9,000 copies in the past eight months and that's not counting the copies provided to constituents by members of Congress (who collectively dispense with thousands more) or copies bought in stores or downloaded from the Internet.We who love the Constitution beam with joy.

But of course that assumes a lot: I read Kierkegaard once; didn't understand a word.I wonder how many of the people currently reading the Constitution, citing it, waving it at rallies, have a clue as to what it means.

Interpreting the Constitution is not as simple as just reading it, of course, although I lean a bit toward the "strict construction" view myself ("words have meanings; it means what it says").There is also the "originalist" view, mostly propounded by people like Justice Scalia, who have advanced degrees in mind-reading and argue that what really matters is not what the Constitution says but what the Founders meant.And there are the LBC'ers ("Living, Breathing Document") who argue that the Constitution, having been written by a bunch of white guys, now long deceased, we should interpret it to say what we think it should say without bothering to go through either of the two prescribed methods for amending it.

There's the Bork school (Robert Bork, even though he was a federal judge, thought we have no rights at all unless the Constitution grants them to us; obviously the bells ending his classes at the University of Chicago Law School rang before discussions reached the reiterative Ninth and Tenth Amendments). And there's the Gingrich school, wherein the First Amendment protection of religious diversity is taken to mean that it is the government's duty to embrace religion, its failure to do so constituting the "secular" portion of the Gingrichian assault on what he defines as the "secular socialism" of the current presidential administration.I do not personally fault Mr. Gingrich for his use of the words "secular" or "socialism"; he was not, after all, an English major, and words are slippery in his grasp.

All this is by way of saying that one who feels strongly about a preferred course of action might be inclined to see the Constitution through a carefully calibrated lens.But there are limits.

Many who today wave the Constitution as Dracula's hunters might have brandished a wooden stake claim it as a protector of the virtue of a constitutionally-guaranteed "small government."Herein lies a fundamental error.Preference for a small government -- a lighter tax burden, more reliance on private initiative, less direction and intrusion emanating from Washington -- have a valid political case to be made; for the most part, I share it.Governments that grow too large threaten both liberty and prosperity.But "small" government is a political preference; it is not a constitutional mandate.What the Constitution offers us is "limited" government.

Here's the difference.If government sticks to its knitting -- does what it's authorized to do -- it might grow quite large, especially in a nation of 300 million people.If the people (or at least those among them who bother to participate in the political process) opt to pay higher taxes for greater benefits, I might oppose them at the polls but what they ask is not constitutionally prohibited."Limits" are as to scope, not size.

The Constitution constrains government and diffuses its authority -- that is at the heart of what makes American different from the nations that went before it -- but it also empowers government.The Founders set out not merely to distance themselves from George III and the British Parliament (they could have done that just by adopting the Declaration of Independence and enforcing it by whomping the Redcoats) but to create a new country.They -- yes, James Madison, too -- wanted a government that operated within limits and with divided realms of authority, but that nonetheless could function as governments function.The Constitution does not prohibit the federal government from taxing the citizenry; it only sets out what kinds of taxes may not be imposed.It acts -- it acted to suppress the Shays Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, to create post offices and roads, to build a military force, to negotiate for land purchases.These were not usurpers; these were the Founders.

It is because government is empowered as well as constrained that it was able to bring together the fighting force that stopped Hitler and the Japanese and boxed in Stalin and ultimately created sufficient pressure on the communist world to reduce it to the pathetic shards that remain today.It was because government was empowered that men, women, and children were saved from drowning in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.It is the reason your Christmas cards were delivered and the reason you are able to drive quickly from wherever you live to wherever you are headed to join in the protest against government.

The irony is that so many who wield the Constitution as their own pet mantra either have no idea what it means or don't care.Some, for example, argue that some people whom the government says are probably terrorists should be locked up and held forever, no charges, nothing, locked away until they rot, just because that's what the government wants.First of all, that's a whole lot like the British kings who locked up their perceived enemies, or rivals, in the Tower of London, or the various world-class dictators from Mao to Mussolini to Pol Pot for whom law was what they said it was.But this locking 'em up on the government's say-so is -- ta-da -- expressly, specifically, clearly, unambiguously prohibited by the Constitution.One may argue that it should be done anyway -- you know, for our safety -- and that's a reasonable argument to make, but one cannot make that argument and stage protests demanding that the government obey the Constitution.

And so my enthusiasm is tempered.I am delighted to see so many Americans rushing to buy the Constitution and equally delighted to see so many demanding that the government adhere to it.Many in the highest ranks of government today operate from the LBD perspective; do what we want to do, run up massive federal deficits, create new federal powers, take over the ownership or management or one-step-removed directorship of banks, businesses, industries.If you're among the many bothered by the rampant growth, and cost, of we-know-best Washington, I'm with you.But don't drag a mangled version of constitutionality into the political ring with you.Don't condone that which is patently unconstitutional (presidents declaring the authority to decide for themselves whether to obey the laws) while wrapping yourself in its pages.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

The new version of Apple’s signature media software is a mess. What are people with large MP3 libraries to do?

When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title.

Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced. Which makes sense: Like the web itself, his schema was shipped, good enough,and an improvement on the vacuum which preceded it. Those three big tags, as they’re called, work well with pop and rock written between 1960 and 1995. This didn’t prevent rampant mislabeling in the early days of the web, though, as anyone who remembers Napster can tell you. His system stumbles even more, though, when it needs to capture hip hop’s tradition of guest MCs or jazz’s vibrant culture of studio musicianship.

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.